The digital computer is a powerful data processing tool that allows a user to organize, store and analyze data in volumes and at rates that would be impossible by any prior known technique. The computer network has been a similar step forward. By linking together several computers and by providing shared resources and cross-platform communications, engineers have developed the computer network into a tool that provides sufficient processing power to support entire corporations and universities. The increased power of computer networks over the individual microcomputer is provided by distributed processing. Distributed processing allows for the division or distribution of a computational workload among the different workstations connected to the computer network.
One of the most widely accepted and heavily used computer networks is the Internet. The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks formed into a single worldwide network. A user, through the Internet, can interactively transmit messages with users in different countries. Similarly, a user in the U.S. can access the files from libraries in Europe and Asia and download these files for personal use. Accordingly, the Internet provides strong communication functions similar to the communication functions provided by ham radio operators. Moreover, the Internet acts like a universal library, providing electronic access to resources and information available from Internet sites throughout the world.
Although the Internet provides excellent and developed resources for communication and file sharing, the Internet is still basically a static medium. In other words, the content of the Internet, i.e., the resources available to a user accessing a site on the Internet, is mostly stored data. Typically, a user moves about the Internet using a web browser program. The web browser program allows for multimedia presentation of stored data including text images, sound clips and video clips. This allows the user to connect via the Internet to different sites on the Internet. However, although a user can view the information stored at an Internet site, and even make a copy for their own personal use, at present, a user lacks a suitable system for directly executing an application program. As such, the Internet generally fails to provide the advantages of distributed processing.
It is, in part, the size of the Internet that has impeded the availability of client/server applications on the Internet. In particular, because the Internet is so vast and open, companies and universities have disposed firewalls between their internal servers and the Internet. These firewalls deny access to useful applications by preventing existing systems, such as NFS and SMB, from accessing the applications. As such, the firewall acts as a barrier that prevents the use of traditional networking systems from executing client/server applications.
In response to this problem, systems have been proposed that provide for application programs that move between an Internet site that stores the application program and an Internet site that services a user wishing to use that application program. One such proposed system is the JAVA system proposed by Sun Microsystems. The JAVA system provides an interpreted language system that can be operated by the Internet user to download and run small application programs, referred to as applets, located at a remote Internet site. Accordingly, the JAVA system provides a form of distributed processing in that application programs located at Internet sites are being made available for distribution to Internet users. This is a significant advance over the prior functions available to Internet users which previously were limited to merely viewing and transferring stored data.
However, although JAVA offers an improvement over the prior art, the JAVA system suffers from some significant drawbacks. First of all, the JAVA system requires that each application that is to be downloaded to an Internet user and run at the Internet user's site, has to be written in the JAVA programming language. Therefore, available program applications such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Intuit Quicken, or other developed application programs must be rewritten in a JAVA compatible programming language before they can be employed with the JAVA system. This of course creates an immediate barrier to the deployment of application programs across the Internet. Moreover, a significant debugging effort will be required as these rewritten applications are not proven code and inevitably will fail either due to bugs created during the rewriting of the program or bugs created by the JAVA system. Moreover, the proposed JAVA system is an interpreted language system, and interpreted language systems are notoriously slow. Consequently, Internet users are likely to notice a substantial decrease in operation speed while they run these applications.
Additionally, JAVA applications available for deployment from an Internet site are programmed specifically for Internet deployment. Accordingly, these JAVA application programs will not be the programs typically employed by users. Instead, it is likely that users will operate non-JAVA programs which are different from those JAVA programs deployed over the Internet. Accordingly, a compatibility rift will develop between Internet users at remote sites and users at the host sites. As such, the JAVA system inherently provides a barrier between users at remote locations and users at host sites.
Accordingly, it is an object of the invention to provide systems that allow for deployment and execution of application programs across the Internet.
It is a further object of the invention to provide systems capable of negotiating Internet firewalls.
It is another object of the invention to provide systems that integrate remote users with the Internet network of the host site.
It is still a further object of the invention to provide systems that deploy existing application programs across the Internet, without having to rewrite the applications.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system for deploying applications across the Internet that provides programs which execute quickly at remote sites.
These and other objects of the invention will be made apparent from the following description of the invention.